3 Key Products That Powered Dongqiudi during the 2018 FIFA World Cup

In this article, we talk about Alibaba Cloud's three key products that supported Dongqiudi in carrying out its operations efficiently during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

During the 2018 FIFA World Cup, Dongqiudi, a Chinese company focusing on sports news, supported over 1 million users on their platform with the help of Alibaba Cloud. Alibaba Cloud also offered professional security management solutions, assisting Dongqiudi to guard against internet attacks, ensuring that millions of football fans around the world could get a full, uninterrupted World Cup experience.

In this article, we talk about Alibaba Cloud's three key products that supported Dongquidi in carrying out its operations efficiently during the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Performance Testing Service (PTS)

Alibaba Cloud Performance Testing Service (PTS) is an excellent SaaS performance testing platform with powerful distributed stress testing capability, able to simulate realistic business scenarios with large numbers of users.

PTS is capable of performing high defense scenario stress testing with zero extra code. Same single/full connection stress testing platform is the basis of its core functionality that Alibaba ecology has used for over four years. It simplifies the work of executing performance testing, allowing the user to focus more energy on the issues of actual business processes and performance, lowering costs, and improving stability and user performance, helping them increase business value to the greatest extent possible.

Just as the World Cup is an essential event to Dongqiudi, PTS is also a fierce competitor, capable of simulating the technical and tactical styles of different challenges. For example, it can simulate the behaviors of different opponents during three games in the group stage, right down to their formations such as 3-5-2 or 4-4-2, or even specific tactics. PTS provides the Dongqiudi server system with comprehensive testing and issues mining to elevate performance better.

The value of a localized stress test or "scrimmage" concerning the experience of a single fan has limitations due to the distorted nature of the test. The value brought by PTS's high fidelity stress testing lies in the ability to simulate different scenarios, data traffic, and realistic environments. Only such simulation or "warm-up" is capable of generating optimum value and foresight capabilities, providing improved feedback and response times for core applications.

In preparation for this year's World Cup, Dongqiudi made full use of the effective interaction and robust functionality provided by PTS to perform end-to-end stress testing and inspection along critical pathways. With concurrency at 500,000 at peak traffic, Alibaba Cloud used end-to-end stress testing to help the client Dongqiudi to simulate simultaneous requests from a massive number of users, continuously tuning the system, and increasing the system's stress capacity by 10 times in order to prepare to cope with the peak levels of traffic during the World Cup.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

Alibaba Cloud CDN distributes content from the source station to the node that is closest to the individual user to deliver the content the user needs, improve response time and success rates for user requests, and solve the issue of latency caused by distribution, bandwidth, and server performance. It can accelerate the data station and improve on-demand service and live streaming performance.

Alibaba Cloud is China's largest CDN service provider, with over 1,500 nodes worldwide, the total bandwidth of over 120 terabytes, and more than 300,000 customers. One-third of internet traffic in China is covered by Alibaba Cloud, including 70% of traffic during the World Cup.

If we compare Dongqiudi to a football team, then we can consider the traffic to the Dongqiudi app a representation of the support of the world's football fans for their "team." If the expectations of the fans exceed the ability of the team to deliver, the performance of the team will be negatively impacted, including coaching and team strategy. They may even manage to miss an easy goal because of the pressure. With CDN, we can help the team adjust to the pressure and divert their attention to focus on the game and make sure every shot goes in.

During this year's World Cup, Dongqiudi used Alibaba's CDN to effectively accelerate image downloads to respond to massive numbers of user requests in a matter of milliseconds and accelerate loading to a matter of seconds, significantly improving the user experience.

Anti-DDoS Pro

Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS Pro addresses the problem of service interruptions caused by attacks by high DDoS traffic on Internet servers (including non-Alibaba Cloud hosts). You can configure it so that attacking traffic can get redirected to Anti-DDoS Pro, thereby ensuring the stability and reliability of the source site.

Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS Service Pro successfully defended against the world's largest DDoS attack, providing precise attack protection, hiding service resources, and providing elastic protection and availability of up to 99.99%.

If we compare the Dongqiudi O&M team to a football team's supporting staff, then when the opponent invests heavily in an outdated attack, or even launches a full-attack, full-defense mode, utilizing the ground, air, passing and shooting, the defending line will experience an onslaught of massive proportions, testing their ability to handle the stress. At this time, the O&M used Alibaba Cloud Anti-DDoS Service Pro to resist the high traffic, multi-dimensional attack and ensure the safety of the "goal."

Since its launch in 2013, Dongqiudi has gradually become the most significant football media and social platform in the world. Dongqiudi has nearly 40 million registered users, due in part to successful marketing during the World Cup, with over 1 million daily downloads and 11 million regular active users.

The World Cup has already come to a close, but the professional reporting provided by Dongqiudi gave fans a more concrete, individualized, and visual football experience. No matter how much you may know about football, Dongqiudi delivers a peerlessly entertaining experience.